The School of Informatics iFriend service provides a mechanism for users outside the school to apply for a guest account which will permit them to access certain services within the school. Some services will supply access to all registered iFriends; others will require specific authorisation to be granted by the owner of the service.

Read our Computing Regulations, as linked from the same page. You will be required to agree to these in order to obtain an iFriend account.

Enter your full email address in the box provided. This email address will be your login ID, and must not be an address in the School of Informatics. (That is, it must not end in inf.ed.ac.uk.)

Click on the 'Request' button'. This will send an email to the address you provided, which contains a link to let you continue to the next step.

Click on the link in the email. If the email doesn't arrive, please check that it hasn't been filtered to your Junk or Spam folders before contacting us.

Re-enter your email address, and pick a password. The password strength meter on the right hand side provides an indication of the quality of this password. Click the box to indicate that you have read, and agree to, our Computing Regulations. Click the 'Set Password' button.

You will now see a confirmation screen confirming the creation of your iFriend account.

Password change

Password reset

Privacy Notice

Information about you: how we use it and with whom we share it

The information you provide will be used by the University to grant you access to certain protected resources managed by the School of Informatics. It will never be used for any other purpose, nor shared with anyone else.

When you sign up for and use the iFriend service, our use of the information you provide will either be necessary for the performance of your contract with us, or by your explicit consent as evidenced by you following the instructions in the email we will send to you and your continuing use of the password you set.

After you no longer use the service we will continue to hold the email address which you used to register. This is for the sole purpose of ensuring that we never re-register it for someone else. This is in the University's legitimate interest, and is to protect our data and systems from access by unauthorized persons.

iFriend provides a means for external collaborators to access applications hosted by the School of Informatics. iFriend has a service which allows you to send invitations requesting that external collaborators apply for iFriend accounts, and directing them to a specific web service once they have applied.

For many applications, allowing access to iFriend users will require those users to be specifically added to that application's authorization rules. This should be requested from the service manager of the relevant application by that friend's local sponsor.

The iFriend service allows users external to the School of Informatics to obtain credentials allowing access to some of our systems. It is therefore important for service managers to ensure that iFriend users don't have access to systems for which they should not be authorized.

iFriend for the Web

iFriend users will be able to access DICE web services which are authenticated via Cosign. If you do not want iFriend users to have access to your service, you should either:

set the CosignRequireFactor directive to INF.ED.AC.UK; or,

implement authorization controls, which either limit access to a specific list of usernames, or which deny access to usernames containing an '@' or '%' symbol.

iFriend access to AFS filespace

Holders of iFriend accounts can be given access to AFS filespace. See iFriend AFS access for details.

iFriend for the command line

iFriend users can access SVN repositories hosted on the University's central subversion service from the command line. See SVN/CVS repositories